John Williams — Soundtrack to Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope


Timeless. Perfect. Enjoy.
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This album was ranked first in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, and was awarded the Golden Protocol Droid for Best Album I Wrote About in 2017
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Space.
Stars twinkle.
Three horizons hang in the distance.
A tiny ship darts by, under heavy fire.
A gigantic grey prow thunders into frame.
And it keeps coming, and coming, and coming.

It would be utterly ridiculous, like Sideshow Bob stepping on far too many rakes, were it not for the atmosphere of chilling, deadly seriousness that is somehow also extraordinarily camp.

The underdog and the tyrant are immediately and unmistakeably established. The Tantive IV is small and white, constructed of pleasantly rounded shapes, clearly desperately fleeing, while the Devastator is a single majestic triangle, vast and coldly grey, imposing itself upon our heroes and the screen alike.

Walt Disney | discogs.com
Every trick of subconscious bias is promptly checked off. It’s so blindingly obvious that it verges on self-parody moments in. But nobody’s laughing. And that’s thanks to the sterling work of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra on the greatest soundtrack in the history of cinema.

It is timeless, and it is perfect.

In form and function, the music of Star Wars is strikingly operatic. Even the simplest and most mundane proceedings — an irksome backseat driver or a simple administrative disagreement — are elevated to high drama by soaring strings and booming brass. In a stroke of theatrical indulgence, Williams makes extensive use of leitmotifs: short, symbolic musical segments that shift and change with their subject. Luke’s theme swells contemplatively as he gazes past the binary sunset, but returns frenzied and panicked during several of his action sequences. The Rebellion fanfare plays softly on subdued woodwinds when the Tantive is captured, shivering with dread, but is reprised boldly on trumpets when the space shoe is on the other space foot during the Battle of Yavin. Mozart would be proud.

Some may criticise this approach as overly didactic, using music to dictate rather than suggest appropriate emotional reactions to the audience, but I would argue that this is the whole point. Everything becomes important. (Additionally, following the mood instead of leading it can backfire spectacularly. In Attack of the Clones, straight after the infamously blunt and enduringly unsexy sand monologue, Anakin and Padmé share their first kiss. The string section swells, dewy-eyed and romantic, but immediately backs off as Padmé changes her mind. It is as if even the orchestra is embarrassed to witness such an awkward moment, and it never fails to draw a laugh out of me. The passive, burnished sheen of newer Star Wars recordings does not help its case. The music of the originals is present and active and ineffably immediate in a way that latter-day Star Wars has not yet rediscovered.) A New Hope is an extravagant melodrama of jolly good and cartoonish evil, like the silent films of early cinema. The music must be comically inflated to offset the alienating unrealism of the silver screen.

Luke is fairly untraumatised by the violent murder of his surrogate parents, leaving their corpses to smoulder as he skips off to join the Rebellion. Almost no ado is made about the three million aboard the Death Star when it is unexpectedly redistributed. And most egregiously, Leia is briefly horrified at the destruction of her homeworld — two billion innocent souls up in less than smoke — but in her very next scene is making quips about the diminutive stature of her guard.

Perhaps our beloved characters throw themselves into the Rebel cause so enthusiastically to hide the deep psychological scarring, constantly bickering and bantering to distract themselves from the ache inside. But this interpretation is not supported by the music. John Williams suggests that these characters are not people, but puppets, empty vessels to be filled with plot and drama, and George Lucas himself concurs. His utilitarian dialogue is reminiscent of children’s television, where all characters are perfectly aware of their emotions and intentions, and constantly exposit them at those around them.

But it is also reminiscent of another genre of heightened reality: theatre. A New Hope is a show. It is a performance, right from the very beginning where a minstrel unfurls a scroll and narrates the introduction, as if Star Wars were a fairy-tale. Everyone is deceptive. Everyone is pretending. Han is pretending that he doesn’t care for the cause. Our initial point-of-view characters, R2-D2 and C-3PO, are pretending that they are not clinging to one another out of sheer terror. They squabble like the old married couple they may as well be because that is the only way they know how to display affection. Darth Vader is pretending that he deserves his wretched existence of loveless servitude after tearing down his old life out of pure paranoia, fanned by the flames of the Emperor’s gaslight. And Leia is pretending she isn’t catastrophically out of her depth, seizing control of her own rescue mission, and insisting to Vader’s face that her suspiciously zippy little corvette is in fact a consular ship on a diplomatic mission. This is, at most, hours after Vader personally witnessed its escape from the orbit of Scarif. He was a heartbeat away from throwing an impromptu boarding party himself. Only she could be so bold.

This is not to imply that A New Hope is shallow. It is certainly simple — an unambiguous clash between good and evil — but its thematic content is universal. Never attempt to negotiate in good faith with someone who holds all the cards, or you may doom your entire planet. Your instincts may or may not be trustworthy, but recognise when things designed to help you are instead hindering you. And above all, in the face of unimaginable adversity, when all other avenues of approach have been blocked, it does not do to give up hope.

I do prefer the new title, after forty years of shifts in popular culture, and especially after seeing Rogue One. Everyone knows about science fiction; setting a war among the stars is par for the course nowadays. That particular epithet functions more effectively as the overarching series title. After seeing first-hand the cost of victory, we know that hope is the only thing that keeps the Rebellion going. The Empire outclasses them in every conceivable measurement: unparalleled firepower, an entire navy at their disposal, literally astronomical financial resources.

And yet, as Emily Dickinson writes, hope is the thing with feathers.

On the topic of things with feathers, that flourishing woodwind section can outsing even the most virtuosic of birds. Damn, folks, the London Symphony can really play. Williams’ compositions are notoriously difficult, even for veteran musicians, often compiling tight clusters of note and obtuse tonal shifts in close succession. His signature fascination with the interplay between triplets and duplets means those who play his music must actively work against muscle memory. But the orchestra navigates even the knottiest sections nimbly and with considerable grace, a compliment that applies doubly to the brass and woodwind sections. The diaphragm is a muscle, and like any other it takes a great deal of strength and skill to push it to the extraordinary heights Williams demands. The London Symphony Orchestra is a prodigiously skilled group of musicians, and they should be proud of their achievement.

When I listen to old, vinyl-crackly jazz music, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia by proxy. All the synchronised brass and jaunty polyrhythms evoke a very particular atmosphere — pinstriped suits and A-line skirts, whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke — that I have never actually experienced myself. There is a timelessness to it. We may have moved on to pastures new, perhaps greener, but this fedorish world still exists as long as there are people to remember it.

I get a similar feeling listening to this soundtrack. It is a portal to a smiling, sharply drawn world that exists only in my imagination, bearing at most a casual resemblance to the real world, but is no less realistic for it. Star Wars makes me think of rosy-cheeked space-age optimism, of Tomorrowland, of David Bowie and Michael Jackson, of when the future was bright and shiny and exciting. And nowhere is this clearer than in a single brief moment of exception. As Luke enters Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi, a low synthesiser hums portentously, and every time I watch the film it completely takes me out of it. That synthesiser reminds me of contemporary soundtracks: cheesy, two-dimensional and tragically dated. It is a lone lapse of judgement in a trilogy of thrillingly original music, but despite its clumsiness, it encourages me to appreciate the rest of the soundtrack all the more.

Each of these worlds of nostalgia has a distinctly different flavour. It is only a single variety of jazz that conjures up the feeling, whereas John Williams’ soundtrack is a confluence of influences. The music of Star Wars takes the rigid regulation of Bach, tempers it with the spiky asymmetry of Stravinsky, and for good measure, tips on a heap of Wagnerian, Mahleresque, Holstish bombast. The result: a sweeping masterpiece of neoclassicism. I adore that poignant violin solo in Leia’s theme that rises higher and higher, modestly drawing to a close on a cloudburst of a note I didn’t even know existed. The Empire clearly takes itself deadly seriously, with all the grim pompous pomp, but the audience is under no such obligation. The dime-shifting colours and moods of the space dogfighting are a master class in incidental music. And that iconic main theme never fails to put a smile on my face, a bold brassy march that takes itself just seriously enough to be inexhaustibly charming. Even when listening to only the soundtrack, an eagle-eared fan can still trace exactly what is happening. This is a triumph of musical storytelling.

At the risk of sounding like an unbearable hipster, you just don’t see genuine composition in modern blockbuster films. Their soundtracks have all the subtlety of a frying pan to the head — jagged, sawing string sections and pounding percussion — because that’s all they need to meet the unbelievably low standards set for them. Williams’ music is elegantly fluid, ebbing and flowing with the onscreen action, whereas a great deal of newer soundtracks find little of interest on the dial between zero and eleven. This is not to say that it is a lost art. Hans Zimmer’s scores, especially those for Inception and Pirates of the Caribbean occupy a fertile middle ground. But none of them hold a candle to Star Wars: beneath the layers of vibrancy and exaggeration, there lies a deep and abiding love for classical music — and let us not conflate that with music merely scored for orchestra. Forty years later, this soundtrack is as fresh and exciting as the day it was recorded.

A general rule of thumb: the better something is, the more flaws can be excused or justified or even outright ignored. And A New Hope, for all its flaws, is an instant classic. I don’t care that the characters deliver their lines as if they are reading from off-screen cue cards. I don’t care about the oblique dimension the squadrons of ships seem to occupy during the assault on the Death Star. I don’t care about Obi-Wan and Vader’s dumb lightsaber poking contest. (I especially don’t care about this one in light of that one scene from Rogue One wherein, not to put too fine a point on it, Vader fucks shit up.)

I can think of no other film that has contributed as much to our cultural lexicon; every other minute, A New Hope originates one of dozens of famous quotes, or displays one of its myriad iconic designs. It is brimming with brilliant, gleaming, new, extraordinary ideas. It gives so much, freely and willingly. It reminds us that even in the darkest night, even now — especially now — that hope is the linchpin, the cornerstone, the beating heart and the first step. And at the end of the day, after all the vaudevillian drama has bowed out, after all the kickass space dogfights have been won, after the greatest film soundtrack ever composed has played its final chords and relaxed into static, that is all we need.

I leave you with the words of someone else.

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
  
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
  
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”